OBAMA AND THE DEATH CAMPS

Dear Leader put his foot in his mouth again referring to "Polish death camps."

The Poles stated the obvious which the American MSM will never say. "It's a pity that such a dignified ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence." That's Obama and his Regime in a nutshell.

That whole history thing gets Obongo in trouble all the time, especially the Nazi Death Camps. All quotes come directly from the horse's...mouth. From the '08 campaign, just in case you didn't happen to catch all the MSM coverage of these whoppers.

"Uh-I had an uncle who was one of the um first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps."

Whoops. He "misspoke". Among other things, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and, more importantly, his "uncle" was completely fictional.

Whoops. Misspoke again. He meant to say that his Great Uncle Charlie liberated Buchenwald. (Charlie was in the NAVY.)

Whoops. Well, but, "He heard the stories of fellow troops who had entered Auschwitz and Treblinka." Fellow troops? Red Army troops? And the Nazis razed Treblinka in October 1944 after a large number of the prisoners rioted and escaped.

Whoops. Yeah, but Grandpa Dumham signed up for the military the day after "the bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor." (Enlistment date: 8 June 1942.)

Whoops. Well, that's what happens when you deal with "countries like Europe."

Somebody call a Navy "Corpseman."

Lord Monckton Gets "Schooled"

Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, (no relation to Lord Vader) is one my favorite modern-day limeys.  He has traveled the world challenging global warming orthodoxy.  Unfortunately, Lord Monckton sometimes finds himself outclassed by the "intellectually superior" global warming arguments.  In this video, Lordie tries to present the "ignorant, flat-Earth" ideas of the global warming deniers to a group of climate change protesters.  He quickly finds that he can't compete with the more "enlightened" positions of the hot air gang.  (Examples: "I can't talk to you." "The moon is green cheese.")

CAN ANYBODY ID THIS AUSSIE VIETNAM SLR SCOPE?

VERY BAD MOVIE REVIEW...BORDER!

 Actual scene from the movie Border!

The Battle of Longewala occurred during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. On the night of 4-5 December, the Pakistani Army’s 18^th Division crossed the border into Western India intending to reduce the Indian Army’s Longewala defenses and then make a long blitzkrieg thrust on into two further towns located at strategic crossroads of the local road network. Strategically, this would be a shocker with the Indian forces focused mainly on the East.

Two infantry brigades and two armored regiments were involved in the attack, some 2,800 men, 65 tanks, and 138 assorted other vehicles such as armored personnel carriers, all supported by artillery. The only thing standing in the way of a potential stab deep into Indian territory was a single company of the Punjab Regiment, about 120 men. They were entrenched on a high dune, behind three strands of concertina wire and a few anti-tank mines, possessing only a single jeep-mounted 106mm anti-tank recoilless rifle. Given the choice to retreat or stay by higher headquarters, the CO chose to stay and fight to hold the position.

In a battle that raged literally all night long, the Punjabs managed to hold their defensive positions against repeated and overwhelming attacks by armor and infantry. At first light, four Indian Air Force Hawker Hunters, which had previously been unable to operate in the dark, caught the Pakistani forces in the open desert and inflicted such heavy casualties in men and armor that the Paki Army was forced to break off the attack.

This battle was truly one of the most epic military stands ever made, as magnificent as Rorke’s Drift or the Alamo, and worthy of a good movie.

With that being said, the movie about the battle was asinine and almost unwatchable. I rented the Indian-made Bollywood film based on the battle, entitled Border, hoping to see a good war movie from a non-American and/or non-Hollywierd perspective.

Instead, I saw one of the worst war movies ever. Mind you, it wasn’t quite as bad as Pearl Harbor (Alec Baldwin as Jimmy Doolittle?!?!) or The Last Drop, but its right up there with those turds.

Yes, I know, artistic license and developing drama and compressing scenes to make the action plain to the viewer and all that. But this thing was so cartoonish, outrageous, unbelievable and militarily incompetent as to be nauseating.

Ordinary, I would heartily enjoy scenes of large numbers of Muslims getting blown up. And I’m always up for a war movie with militarily correct hardware (T-55s rather than the old standby M48s with a German cross on them), although the entire Pakistani Army is inexplicably armed with Indian 1A1 FALs. But this film manages to make even the battle scenes boring and utterly unbelievable at the same time.

            Think Sam Pekinpah meets Bugs Bunny meets WWII Propaganda film (“Joe! The dirty Japs got Joe!”). If there was ever a movie made for Mike and the ‘Bots at Mystery Science Theater 3000 to slam, this would be it, except that it runs three hours.

            Both the characters and the plot are utterly cartoonish and predictable. The only thing unpredictable is just how many different times the same predictable thing happens. The CO manages to personally man every weapon on the perimeter, make dozens of patriotic speeches, and inspire every man in his command. I lost count of the individual soldiers who run out of the trenches and across the desert to make “heroic” single-handed attacks on the Pakistani tanks.

            This must be the director’s first experience with squibs. Most of the heroes take about fifty 7.62mm rounds to the chest but still manage to drag themselves back to the firing line to give a less than subtle patriotic speech with their dying gasps. Again and again and again. The extras, of course, die instantly from one shot. While the Punjabs lost only a couple of men in the real battle, this movie makes you think they suffered about 350% casualties.

And then there’s all the fuel-air explosions, particularly from the special Shrapnel-Free™ artillery, which make even a 1980’s Schwarzenegger action flick look like kids playing with sparklers. Maybe it was the director’s first experience with squibs and fuel-air explosions.

            The Flag-Waving He-Man Macho Chest-Beating Country Uber Alles is so heavy-handed, overbearing and repetitious it gets actually sickening. And this is before the battle. Yes, you can make a point of patriotism, of the harshness of a soldier’s duty, and the sacrifice and emotional turmoil it brings. But do you have to have a dozen different characters make the exact same point, with all the subtlety of a sledge hammer blow to the forehead, over and over and over again? Does the director think we missed that message the last 17 times?

            Did I forget to mention it’s also a flippin’ musical? That’s right, there’s nothing like a war movie with The Sound of Music interspersed between the explosions, screams and fake blood. These musical scores are mostly about falling in love with “the girl I left behind me”; deliriously happy young couples cavorting hand in hand through the admittedly beautiful Indian countryside. Here, at least the subtitles provide some pretty good entertainment. “Since I found you, emotion of adequacy is improved.”

            Just when you think it’s over, the soldiers, with the enemy practically within sight, have a huge male-bonding drum-circle-type festival and sing of glory and comrades and country, in case we missed it the first 27 times. You can cut the testosterone with a knife. For this particular musical score, I kept expecting something like, “Kill the Pakis! Kill the Pakis! With my spear and magic helmet! Spear and magic helmet!”

            The “climactic” battle scene lasts about an hour, and actually gets pretty boring after awhile. Both sides line up in neat rows, dress-right-dress like toy soldiers, and just keep blasting away at each other endlessly. More rounds were apparently expended in this single battle than in the entire Second World War. In numerous scenes, they’re not even shooting blanks and all the guns, of course, have no recoil. When they do shoot blanks, they apparently don’t have blank firing adapters as the soldiers keep having to rack the charging handle after every shot. Except for the CO. At one point he magically manages to turn his semi-automatic 1A1 SLR into one of those endless-magazine full-autos and sprays the Pakis from the hip in true action hero tradition.

            Once more, the subtitles provide more entertainment than the action scenes. “Those rascals vex me! Make them expire painfully!”

Of course, all the explosions and gunfire lapse into complete silence occasionally for yet another character’s last gasp speech of duty, honor, country. Alright already! We get it!

Multiple redundant cut scenes jump to the Indian Air Force CO waiting impatiently for daylight so his squadron can provide air support to the beleaguered infantry. I don’t know many times we see him either checking his watch or asking the pilot beside him what time it is; it seems like about a hundred. Along with checking the time and cursing the night, he keeps telling his pilots, “We attack rapidly when the sun brings forth light to the sky!”

When the IAF does fly to the rescue, arriving like the cavalry at the last moment, in good old WWII Propaganda movie fashion the same model tank keeps getting blown up. As a modern special effects touch, the Hunters come flying in on the deck. And I mean on the deck, like about five foot altitude. Low enough to be knocking tank commanders’ helmets off, clipping bayonets off the infantrymen’s rifles, and flying through their own gigantic fuel-air explosions.

At the end…well, I had dozed off in my La-Z-Boy and my wife shut the movie off.

Roger Ebert probably liked it, but I give this one Zero Stars. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

HOW THE AMERICAN MILITARY BUYS STUFF

 

One extreme or the other, either way common sense is verbotten.

The “Trapdoor” Springfield .45-70 used by the US Army in the aftermath of the Civil War had the main virtue of being cheap…the many existing examples of old muzzle-loading rifles could be converted inexpensively to breach-loading. So, when civilians were running around with 7-shot Spencers and 16-shot Henry repeaters. To add an extra headache for the soldier, early .45-70 cartridges were made of copper, which liked to expand in the chamber and not eject. The friggin’ MANUAL advised the soldier to buy a pocket knife to pry out jammed cases. One shudders to think what would have happened to the Brits at Rorke’s Drift if they had Springfields rather than Martini-Henrys.

 Model 1873 Springfield Trowel Bayonet: You can dig a hole, lay bricks, stab people...you can even cut a tin can with it...but you wouldn't want to.

If that weren’t bad enough, someone designed the “trowel bayonet”; you attached it to your rifle muzzle to use the gun as a shovel. Teddy Roosevelt took one look at it and said, “Get rid of that POS!” Our current Command-in-Chief would take one look at a bayonet and say, “What is it?”

WWI showed the vital necessity of the machine gun in a modern army. In 1911, an American Colonel by the name of Isaac Newton Lewis truly “built a better mousetrap” in the form of his Lewis light machine gun. The US Army wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, mainly because Chief of Ordnance General William Crozier didn’t like Lewis personally. Lewis resigned, took his machine gun design to Europe, and became a very wealthy man. First Belgium adopted his gun (the Belgian Rattlesnake) and then the United Kingdom. It proved to be an awesome, reliable, versatile and relatively compact (for the day) weapon that saw service as everything from a light infantry MG, to aircraft armament, to anti-aircraft armament, to tank armament and soldiered on through WWII.

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 The Gunny evaluates the Chauchat.

Lacking automatic weapons and artillery when they arrived in France, the American Expeditionary Force chose to use…not the Lewis gun. No, the US Army opted for the French Chauchat, whose claim to fame is still “the worst machine gun ever.”

Flash forward to WWII. The fledgling Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex sent the US Navy to war with faulty torpedoes with an even faultier detonator made by (surprise!) GE. The Mark 14 torpedo NEVER HAD A LIVE-FIRE TEST. Rather like buying a plane without flying it.

No one knows how many American sailors and airmen died because of this wonder turd. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, submarine skippers found out the awful truth in wartime conditions. Sargo fired twelve torpedoes as four different Japanese ships on December 24, 1941, approaching to close range and setting up perfect tracks. None of the torpedoes hit anything. Soon after, Seadragon got one hit out of eight fish fired. Tunny had a chance to sink three Japanese aircraft carriers and fired all ten tubes at them; seven of the fish exploded prematurely and the carriers sailed away. Tinosa fired nine torpedoes from perfect position and a range of less than half a mile (rock-throwing distance in naval warfare) at a stationary Japanese vessel…all nine were duds. Tullabee fired a Mk 14 which circled back and sank the sub itself. Some theorize that at Midway, Torpedo Squadron 8, which bored in on the Japanese carriers at close range and lost all 15 Douglas Devastators (one man alone survived from the whole squadron), may have achieved some hits with their torpedoes but they failed to explode or didn’t run true.

 "The fish is running hot in the tube again, Chief!"

"Beat on the back of the tube with a sledgehammer!"

(true incidents.)

The Big Whigs, of course, tried to blame the dumb-ass squids. The Mark 18 electric torpedo which replaced it wasn’t a helluva an improvement either. Of the Mk 18’s she fired, Spearfish reported that one sank, one broached and ran wild, three fishtailed at launch and hit the outer doors before disappearing, and seven missed astern.
 
Korean War-era: see Light Rifle Trials.

Pre-Vietnam: There's a reason they call the M-60 machine gun "The Pig".

Vietnam…don’t get me started on the M16 series.

 

"Well, at least it's not locked onto the exhaust fan in the latrine this time."

(True incident)

In my day, it was the M247 Sergeant York self-propelled AA gun. God only knows how many billions were spent on this wonder turd before it was finally nixed in 1985. I’ve referenced this before HERE. Meanwhile, the 1962-vintage Soviet ZSU-23-4 Shilka and 1973-era German Flakpanzer Gepard, with upgrades, are still soldiering on.

 Just recently, several firms submitted weapons for the Army’s new SASS Semi-Automatic Sniper System. After “exhaustive testing”, the Army picked the “winner”. Of course, they wouldn’t release anything about the testing,, methods, performance or criteria. Remington even filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see the test records; it was denied. Shades of the Light Rifle Trials again. Things that make you go hmmmm. 

Now, the United States Air Force is going to:
 “Choose a winner in its troubled Light Air Support competition without actually flying the two contending planes, the Embraer Super Tucano and the Hawker-Beechcraft AT-6, and it will even disregard what it has data from the limited 'flight demonstration' it conducted last year.” 

Yeah, who needs to actually fly a plane before purchasing it in large quantities.

“A chagrined Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz has publicly pledged ‘we'll work our asses off’ to get it right."

By getting it right, I assume he means which company will offer him the highest three-figure salary as a “consultant” after he retires from the military. I’ve mentioned Pentagon Wars, with Kelsey Grammar and Cary Elwes, before. If you haven’t seen it you really owe it to yourself to put it on your Netflix list.

 My ex brother-in-law is a now-retired senior NCO who had to pull a tour at the Pentagon (“The worst two years of my life!”) and he claimed it was the most accurate depiction he’d ever seen of how things really work behind the curtain of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.